THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE I 39 THE REVIEW ›› THE ALTERNATIVE NEWS On the road to nowhere…
Demanding bosses, wake-up calls, taxis and BA's celebs – welcome to The Business Travel Magazine's Alternative News
‘GET me to Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and make it snappy!’ That’s just one of a long list of unusual demands from bolshie bosses according to a recent survey of PAs. One PA was told to
deliver a haggis to a restaurant in New York, and another had to ensure a chest of drawers of a certain size was in their boss's hotel room. But surely the award for outstanding achievement goes to the PA who flew from Auckland to London and back – with just a four-hour turnaround in London – in order to collect their boss's birthday present to his wife.
The survey of over 500 PAs,
conducted by private jet booking service,
privatefly.com, also revealed that two-thirds of PAs are typically given a fortnight’s notice of travel plans, with a third making arrangements for bosses just three to
six days ahead of departure. Almost half have arranged boss’s private holidays and one PA said they had even been put in charge of their boss's honeymoon.
MILES MORE EXPENSIVE
BOOKENDING a list of taxi transfer costs between airports and city centres around the world are, unsurprisingly, Tokyo (£191.48) – the most expensive – and Bulgarian capital city, Sofia, the cheapest (£2.17). But the research conducted by Moneycorp showed that, per kilometre, the £34.08 taxi transfer from Copenhagen Airport to the city centre is the most expensive. Taxi transfers in Geneva, Tokyo, Brussels and Amsterdam were the next most expensive journeys per kilometre. The cheapest per kilometre taxi transfers, meanwhile, are clocked up in Delhi, Bangkok, Istanbul and Bucharest.
NATIONAL WAKE-UP CALL
ALARM clocks across the nation start ringing at 6.22am on a weekday and the snooze button is hit five times before the day begins in earnest. That’s the start of the average working day according to Premier Inn who surveyed 2,000 people on their sleeping habits. Its report reveals four distinct categories of snoozers: 14 per cent were ‘eternal snoozers’ who repeatedly resort to the snooze button; a quarter hit the snooze button just once – the ‘just one more minute’ category; a further quarter, the ‘shock wakers’, prefer an alarm call so loud it frightens them into waking up; and finally the ‘up and at ‘ems’ – those tough souls who rise at the alarm clock’s first beep.
GEOGRAPHY LESSONS NEEDED
BA CALLS ON THE STARS...
BRITISH Airways has been ushering celebs down the red carpet in a series of recent promotions. First up was actress Gemma Arterton, helping to raise awareness of BA’s first A380 services going on sale – October 15th is the date for the launch of the superjumbo on flights between Heathrow and Los Angeles. “It’s very exciting that the A380 will be flying to Los Angeles,” she
said. Next up was presenter and musician Myleene Klass who advised Brits to take advantage of the carrier’s new summer schedule: “Grab your bikini and let's get out of this freezing weather!" Finally, and not quite so A-list, BA brought in dancers from the Sri Sadd- hatissa International Buddhist Centre to mark the April launch of flights between Gatwick and Colombo, in Sri Lanka.
ONE in five people think the Isle of Man is in the English Channel, one third of under 30-year-olds believe Land's End is in the North, and seven per cent of Londoners think Oxford is the nearest city to the Lake District. The disappointing display of geographical knowledge was revealed by a Virgin Trains poll of 1,000 people. Seven per cent of respondents thought Portsmouth is on the Scottish coast, and one in five believe Hadrian's Wall divides either Devon and Cornwall, Yorkshire and Lancashire, England and Wales or even north and south London. The poll also asked partici-
pants about perceived train journey times between major cities, with over 70 per cent thinking a typical train journey from London to Manchester takes between three and five hours, compared to the actual time of just over two hours.
62 THE BUSINESS TRAVEL MAGAZINE
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